Roast Pork with Long Hots

At a Philadelphia roast pork counter the pork is already cooked before the line forms. A garlic-and-fennel-rubbed shoulder is roasted the day before, chilled overnight so it firms up enough to shave, then sliced paper-thin and dropped back into a steam-table pan of its own jus to reheat. When an order lands the slices come out dripping and go onto the roll wet, the jus still running off them. This long-hots build keeps that whole base and changes one thing: instead of bitter greens it gets fried Italian long hots, finger-length frying chiles blistered in oil until the skins char and the flesh goes slack, and their pepper oil joins the jus in the roll.

The peppers are the move, and frying them is the reason it works. Raw, a long hot is a sharp front-of-mouth sting that spikes and quits. Cooked slow in oil until the skin chars and the wall collapses, the same pepper turns deep and slow and a little sweet, the burn arriving late and spreading rather than stabbing. The chiles are left in long ribbons, not diced, so each bite catches a stripe of heat instead of a flat wash of it. They go on still glistening, and the oil that cooked them runs into the jus the pork was reheated in, so the bread underneath is soaking up two fats at once.

Slice the pork too thick and it reheats to a chew that fights the roll; shaved thin off a chilled roast, it goes pliable in the jus and folds soft into the pile. The roll has to do two opposite jobs, soaking enough jus to flavor through while holding enough structure not to dissolve, which is why a fresh seeded Italian roll with a chewy crust is the only bread that survives the load. Sharp aged provolone is laid on the hot slices so it half-melts and binds, its tang the only assertive note answering the chiles. Too little jus and the sandwich eats dry; too much and the bottom blows out before it reaches the hand.

You smell the oil and the char before you reach the counter, the peppers slumping in the pan and the garlic off the warm pork carrying down the line. The slices come out of the jus steaming, the provolone goes slack against them, the long hots get draped on in oily ribbons. The roll darkens and goes heavy in the hand within seconds. The first bite is soft pork and salt and warm jus, and then the pepper heat arrives a beat behind it, low and building, with the provolone's sharp edge cutting across the fat. By the third bite the heat has climbed and the roll is saturated, and the last inch has to be eaten fast before the bottom gives way entirely.

Philadelphians call this the city's other sandwich, the one the locals order while the visitors line up for cheesesteaks two stalls over. The order at the counter is short: roast pork, sharp, long hots, and whether you want it wet or, foolishly, dry. The greens-versus-peppers question is the standing choice, broccoli rabe for the bitter camp and long hots for the heat camp, and plenty of regulars get both stacked together. It is steam-table food at heart, pork and peppers held hot in their pans all morning, assembled in three motions and a ladle when the order hits, fast because the slow work was done the day before.

The long-hots version sits inside the wider Philadelphia roast pork family, each build swapping out the green or the heat against the same jus-soaked pork and provolone. The canonical reading runs garlicky broccoli rabe for bitterness rather than chiles; a milder one uses sauteed spinach and reads sweeter and softer; some counters set sharp provolone against the heat where others use a young provolone that mostly binds. The pepper steak is the nearest cousin and the one worth setting beside it: it runs the same fried long hots over griddled beef instead of roasted pork, which is the cheesesteak's lineage rather than the roast pork's, and the two never share a pan.

Origin and history

The roast pork sandwich is older in Philadelphia than the cheesesteak it is usually measured against. Its lineage runs back to the Italian South Philly of the early twentieth century and to porchetta, the herb-and-garlic roasted pork that immigrants from central Italy carried over. John's Roast Pork traces to a stand Domenico Bucci opened around 1930 near the old Baltimore and Ohio railyards, selling pork on a roll; his grandson John later added sharp provolone and sauteed spinach in the 1970s, and other counters answered with broccoli rabe in place of the spinach. The long hots and the bitter greens are both twentieth-century additions to a sandwich that began as plain pork and bread.

The greens and the peppers each have their loyal counters, but the version that carried the sandwich to a national audience is the broccoli-rabe build. In 2012 Adam Richman's Travel Channel program named the roast pork at Tommy DiNic's, in Reading Terminal Market, the best sandwich in America, beating a field that included a cheesesteak from John's. The win put a regional Italian-American counter sandwich on television screens across the country and sent lines out into the market aisles.

At DiNic's the pork is roasted, rested overnight, sliced thin, and reheated to order in a wine-and-herb jus, the same sequence the long-hots build runs at counters across the city with the chiles standing in for the rabe. The stall takes its name from Thomas Nicolosi and his cousin Frankie DiClaudio, the family having kept a South Philadelphia butcher shop since 1918. It has sold the sandwich out of Reading Terminal Market since 1980.